Metiria Turei admitted she didn’t admit to having flatmates in order to collect a bigger benefit payment.

Rodney Hide at the NBR and Whaleoil have past quotes which show she didn’t name the baby’s father when she not only knew who he was but ensured he maintained a relationship with his daughter and took money from him and his family.

Is that fraud too?

After earlier saying she’d pay back the money if WINZ asked her to, she’s now decided she’ll pay it back anyway.

Will it be just the extra accommodation payment she got or should she, or the child’s father, also be paying what he would have been liable for had she named him and will anyone be looking into whether the help she got from him, his family and her own should have been declared too?

Life on a benefit wasn’t easy back then and isn’t now.

But a lot of people managed then and manage now without committing fraud.

A lot more people work hard to pay taxes.

Most accept the necessity of doing so to help people in genuine need, a lot fewer are happy to support someone who’s getting more than they’re entitled to through fraud.

Isn’t the most dirty trick exposed in Nicky Hager’s book, the revelation that Hager reveals that he received six years of stolen e-mails, hacked from Cameron Slater’s Gmail and Facebook accounts?

Is it not ironic that so many on the left have marched and protested against the right of the GCSB to assist the SIS or the Police to intercept communications, if a Judge or retried Judge agrees that there is enough evidence of criminal or national security issues to give out an interception warrant. They protested for weeks and months.

Yet when we get evidence of a massive criminal hacking of six years of personal communications, then they do not see that as dirty politics. They celebrate it, because it occurred against someone they do not like. Does this not suggest a large degree of hypocrisy and faux outrage over the GCSB changes last year? Are any of those anti-GCSB protesters going to condemn Nicky Hager and his unknown associate/s for the hack and publication of Cameron Slater’s Gmail and Facebook?

Do all those journalists who wrote dozens and dozens of stories about the GCSB Bill, have a view on whether it is okay to criminally hack someone’s private communications, because you don’t like what they write? Is this where we want politics in New Zealand to go – partisans from the left and right trying to hack each other’s communications?

The book does expose dirty politics in New Zealand, the dirty politics of those who criminally hack private communications, and publish them. They’ve just had journalists in the UK go to jail for publishing stories that they knew were based on hacked voicemails. Here though, you get to make royalties out of them.

I don’t think it’s wrong for a judge, retired or practising, to give authorities the right to intercept communications where there is sufficient evidence to justify it.

I do think it’s wrong for someone to hack someone else’s emails to use them selectively and to do so for political purposes.

. . . Despite Kim Dotcom’s schmoozing of MPs from most Opposition parties at his mega-mansion, the last chance for a significant tie-up – at least with a party that can be confident of holding a seat after September 20 – seems to have faded to black.

Without that, the Internet Party is facing the reality of its pledge to fold the tent and endorse another party if it is not polling more than the 5 per cent threshold before the election campaign.

Would it be too cruel to mark a party’s death on the day it is born? . . .

Hone Harawira won’t do anything unless Dotcom refuses to entertain any deal with National and has several other reasons to stay clear of the dotbomb party:

They don’t have a real membership base.

They don’t have clear policies.

They don’t have recognisable political leaders.

They don’t have any candidates.

Time is short to prepare for the election and to organise the campaign.

Asking members to put election prep on hold “while we wait for the Internet Party to decide what they stand for is just not an option”.

. . . Dotcom made a successful application for an interim injunction against Wayne Tempero in the High Court at Auckland yesterday. The action came soon after the Herald reported that Tempero was set to release “secret revelations” about Dotcom’s “mindset and megalomania”. . .

“Last year I was invited to meet with Kim Dotcom, but I declined because I didn’t want to get swamped by the Labour, Greens and NZ First pilgrimages to the mansion,” said Hone Harawira, MANA Leader and MP for Te Tai Tokerau.

“But when the invitation was extended again earlier this year I decided to accept, but not at Coatesville. I met with Dotcom at my mates place on the Shore where we discussed a number of issues: . . .

“We clearly have common interests, but for the record, I didn’t ask him to fund MANA, and he didn’t offer to either. I didn’t ask him to join MANA, and he didn’t ask me to join his party.”

“I haven’t spoken publicly about the meeting because I haven’t yet spoken with the MANA Exec about it. That’s set for later this week.

The strategy paper (below) reveals that Martyn Bradbury is working for Kim Dotcom and is charging him $8000 per month plus GST for political strategy, on top of a $5000 payment to allow him to upgrade his computer, cellphone and tablet devices. . .

Further, the strategy document, which Trotter so clearly expands upon, shows that Martyn Bradbury intends to stand in Auckland Central as the Internet Party candidate, and be paid for the privilege of doing so. His strategy document outlines the need to establish an office.

The media compromise:

However the subterfuge is deeper than that. Sources have revealed that Scoop Media’s General Manager Alistair Thompson is to be the Party Secretary and has already registered the domain names under the Scoop Media banner. Scoop Media is also the name server registrant for the domain name and also that of internetparty.co.nz . . .